Excerpts from a Virtual Reality Researcher
It’s been a long time since I’ve rapped at ya, and well, obviously a lot has happened with a world pandemic taking place and such. Tying things back to the general themes of this blog, I’ve been working from home since March, 2020 and been thinking about impacts of the pandemic on our lab, and …
Over recent years, I’ve started receiving questions along the lines of: “with all of the HMD technology available now, why is a CAVE such as this still needed?”. Valid question – I have a response to this that I feel pretty strongly about, and it’s hard to relate sometimes for those who haven’t been in …
In my opinion, Unity has emerged as a near standard for most VR development these days. While in general I don’t have a whole lot of bad to say about Unity, I have recently come across a few nuances or “gotchas” that may be of help to all who work with Unity. 1. Setting an …
A nice bonus we came across recently at the lab was how Windows 8.1 handles system setups with 2 GPUs. Since the beginning of our lab, our CAVE machines have each had 2 GPUs in them, but it was always a challenge to correctly program a scenario to make use of both GPUs at once. …
Projectors that accompany immersive display systems often times are not the easiest pieces of machinery to operate. Sure, turning them on and obtaining an image is simple, but at least for the projectors we have, some features and settings are definitely not obvious in terms of what they do or how to properly set them. …
Over the past year, I proudly welcomed a new addition to my family – Weston William Tredinnick. Now that we’ve attained a pretty smooth routine with him and he’s sleeping well – I’ll be aiming to write a bit more on this blog. Several other exciting changes have been happening around the LEL – our …
In general, I think Oculus has been making some good moves and making some good general progress on the advancement of their HMD. I am looking forward to trying out the consumer available HMD later this Spring. One area that hasn’t made a huge amount of sense to me was their move to disallow the …
A couple of new pieces of technology have caught my radar recently. One is Valve’s Lighthouse Tracking System. This technology may replace the 10-30,000 dollar tracking systems that presently exist and remain an expensive selling point for VR display systems. Another one that has caught my attention is Google’s Project Soli. It’s basically an embedded …
With the vizHome project – a significant challenge has been determining techniques to efficiently render the millions of points we capture by way of the LiDAR scanner. Some of the homes we scanned resulted in data sets upwards of 750 million points. Although very powerful, modern GPUs are nowhere near being able to rendering that …
It seems that these days new Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) are being released every month or so, with their cost rapidly declining since the days from 2004-2006 when I worked with one in graduate school. Overall, my impression with recent HMDs is that they are hands down better than the one I worked with during graduate …